What do Atheists Believe?

[Skyler]

If there's one thing I've heard about atheists, it's that they do not believe in the existence of a God.

So then, what do you believe?

It's been my experience that there is little or no value in engaging in a debate with someone who has no position on the subject. So, please, share your positions.

[olavisjo]

I apologise for taking this thread back so far, but it appears as though things have moved on apace since I was last here.

No problem.

Please quote the part where I say murder is not real. You are constructing a straw man.

Do you want to say that murder is real? Or it is not real, the choice is yours.

This is a choice which was not the topic under discussion, and is just more obfuscation. I have never questioned the reality of murder. You supplied a way in which to find out if 'murder is real', as though I actually contended it was not. I have contended no such thing, and this is a straw man argument. The tactic has not worked.
Please quote the part where I say that murder is not real, or admit that you cannot.

My assumption is that your position is "that moral values are not objective and real like gravity, but subjective and imaginary like 'jello tastes better than ice cream'".
So, that would lead me to believe that to you, 'torturing children is wrong' or 'murder is wrong' are not real but just imaginary human constructs.
As for finding a quote where you explicitly say "murder is not real", as far as I know none exists.

Aside from that, if we follow your reasoning, and kill someone and nothing 'happens', by which, as far as I can gather, you either mean a realisation that murder is 'wrong' or punishment, any sociopath can be said not to have murdered, and anyone who is not caught and put in prison can be said not to have murdered.

I covered that point, the more often you break the law the blinder you get to it, a mafia boss has no problem killing people, after a few dozen hits it becomes old hat. But for you it would be an eye opener.

Your answer again seems to be to an entirely different point from the one it appears after. You said that

If you doubt gravity, test it, drop a ball if it does not fall to the ground, there is no gravity. If you doubt murder is real, test it, kill someone if nothing happens then murder is not real, but just a human construct.

I say to you that by this reasoning, a sociopath can be said not to have murdered, and anyone who is not caught cannot be said to have murdered. I said NOTHING about whether these people are used to killing or not.

My point still stands. Please address it.

If your point was "any sociopath can be said not to have murdered, and anyone who is not caught and put in prison can be said not to have murdered".
My position is that moral values are objective. And any person who has a functioning moral compass can perceive the truth of moral values. Unfortunately in humans the compass has gone wrong so we can't always clearly know what is right and wrong, but we can still work it out.
A sociopath is a person whose moral compass has gone very wrong so it is very hard for them to know right from wrong, but it does not excuse them from the hideous things that they do. You, on the other hand, have a very good moral compass so when you do something wrong you know it and feel bad about it and you strive not to do it again. So you doing bad things is the proof that you need to show that moral values are objective and not just based on personal preference. And even greater proof is when someone does something bad to you, you will know that they did something objectively wrong to you.

Please for one moment attempt to answer my posts without just framing another question designed to shift the burden... Instead of questioning my opinion, you would be better served providing evidence of your assertion that all women who abuse their children don't know what they're doing.

In my experience I have found that people do not do what they think is wrong unless they have a good reason to do so. The mother may think that she is instilling discipline in the child and it is good for the child, but she is mistaken and really does not know what she is doing. A healthy woman will not abuse a child, therefore women who do abuse children must be ill mentally, morally or spiritually.

More straw men. Nowhere have I said that I do not think that abusing children is wrong. I feel it is wrong, and I probably always will. What I am asking you to do is show that it is objectively wrong. Your attack on an argument that was never there does not do this.

All I can say is trust your moral compass

... if you go out and murder someone, your moral eyes will be opened and you will gain the knowledge of good and evil.

You have not performed the experiment. It is only another unsupported assertion that 'it is all the same'. According to you, one must perform the experiment in order to see right and wrong. Is there any reason which makes this not apply to you too?

Where did I say "one must perform the experiment in order to see right and wrong"? My position is that if a healthy person does something wrong they will know that they have done something wrong. It is also true that a healthy person will know that it is wrong to do something morally wrong without doing the experiment, but they can still live under the false assumption that moral values are not objective.

It is more than just 'you will feel bad about it' it is like a sheet of glass breaking and you can never put it back together again. I am appealing to your human nature to know good from evil, we act as if moral values are objective, and it would be very hard to live our lives as if they were not.

According to you, after having experienced this 'sheet of glass breaking' which you can 'never put back', some people go on to become blind. At what point? After murder number 2? 3? 10? Why would they do that?

Generally people do not start with murder, it may start with shoplifting a candy bar followed by a steady escalation of anti-social behavior which may progress to murders.

'Evil', as I have already explained, is not a concept which has much meaning to me, because it is fundamentally a religious one, and I am not religious. Outside of religion I think it is meaningless, and therefore I argue that nothing in my human nature will show knowledge of it. I know what people would like done to them generally, and I know what they would not like. This is because I know what I would and would not like, and being a social animal, I want to do stuff that people will like, and avoid stuff that people won't like. I have no desire to be ostracised.

I wish that we were all like you, however we have people like Tomas de Torquemada, Vlad Tepes, Adolph Hitler, Ivan the Terrible, Adolph Eichmann, Pol Pot, Mao Tse-tung, Idi Amin, Joseph Stalin and Genghis Khan. The word 'evil' best describes these and many other people.

[Skyler]

What is reality? As for being 'trained' to pet a bengal tiger, well, that would be a good way to get eaten and not pass on our genes. That behavior would have the effect of removing said individuals from the gene pool so they do not reproduce.

And what I said was, we were fooled into thinking that the best way to pet a Bengal tiger is to run away from it. Therefore, those individuals would survive, but only because they were misinterpreting reality.

The ones that avoid the Bengal tiger get to pass on their genes to their offspring..

And, thereby, passing on the misrepresentation of reality for survival. I rest my case.

What case were you making, exactly? That illusion, if it contributes to survival of the individual and the society, is beneficial in spite of its falshood? That sounds like exactly how religion works.

The case I'm making is that it is possible that we evolved to misrepresent reality. How do we know if this is or is not the case?

[Goat]

The case I'm making is that it is possible that we evolved to misrepresent reality. How do we know if this is or is not the case?

We never can tell .. however, from a practical point of view, our senses allow us to survive. Good enough.

[bernee51]

The case I'm making is that it is possible that we evolved to misrepresent reality.

We did...there is the widespread belief in duality - that consciousness is seperate to and independent of the physical.

How do we know if this is or is not the case?

By intense self-enquiry, study and deep meditation. I suggest that the work of those who have spent millennia in the study of consciousness should not be overlooked.

[Cathar1950]

The case I'm making is that it is possible that we evolved to misrepresent reality. How do we know if this is or is not the case?

If it misrepresented reality it wouldn't be of much value to the species.
Granted they is more light and sound then our senses detect but it is enough to make our way in the world and even feed ourselves and avoid danger. If there was no correspondence between reality and our senses we would soon find ourselves in a purely random meaningless world. Because we can depend on some correspondence reason and logic work.
We can be fooled by such notions that do misrepresent reality and that is why science has been such a useful tool and that is why we need to look deeper then what your post implies.

[Skyler]

The case I'm making is that it is possible that we evolved to misrepresent reality. How do we know if this is or is not the case?

If it misrepresented reality it wouldn't be of much value to the species.
Granted they is more light and sound then our senses detect but it is enough to make our way in the world and even feed ourselves and avoid danger. If there was no correspondence between reality and our senses we would soon find ourselves in a purely random meaningless world. Because we can depend on some correspondence reason and logic work.
We can be fooled by such notions that do misrepresent reality and that is why science has been such a useful tool and that is why we need to look deeper then what your post implies.

I didn't say there was no correspondence, I said that we represented reality in a way which proved most conducive to the survival of the organism. That doesn't necessarily mean an accurate representation of reality.

Take the Matrix for example.

As for reason and logic, I have yet to see a naturalistic explanation for why they work in the first place. By all rights they should vary from culture to culture.

And, science, being a purely human construct, would also be subject to constraints imposed on us by our evolution. So you're not avoiding the issue at all.

[JoeyKnothead]

Reality shmality. Reason and logic work because they are great ways to understand the world around us. Being unable to 'get' why they work don't mean they don't.
Science could be considered a human construct, but it bases its results on what the real world has to say, so to say.

[Cathar1950]

The case I'm making is that it is possible that we evolved to misrepresent reality. How do we know if this is or is not the case?

If it misrepresented reality it wouldn't be of much value to the species.
Granted they is more light and sound then our senses detect but it is enough to make our way in the world and even feed ourselves and avoid danger. If there was no correspondence between reality and our senses we would soon find ourselves in a purely random meaningless world. Because we can depend on some correspondence reason and logic work.
We can be fooled by such notions that do misrepresent reality and that is why science has been such a useful tool and that is why we need to look deeper then what your post implies.

I didn't say there was no correspondence, I said that we represented reality in a way which proved most conducive to the survival of the organism. That doesn't necessarily mean an accurate representation of reality.

Take the Matrix for example.

As for reason and logic, I have yet to see a naturalistic explanation for why they work in the first place. By all rights they should vary from culture to culture.

And, science, being a purely human construct, would also be subject to constraints imposed on us by our evolution. So you're not avoiding the issue at all.

You choose to have an unnatural explanation that has little or no correspondence to reality?
I was watching PBS Nova " on fractmetry, a field of mathematics based on the intricate patterns found in nature, art, science and even the human heart beat".
And the simple can look very complex if repeated over and over with even little changes.
I would think as creatures that evolved and changed over millions of years would share biological relationships that correspond to our reality all inherited that is the grounds environment for our cultures. It would be odd if it didn't.
It is not the natural that has lost the connection, it is the supernatural that has and does so by definition.
How does belittling the natural or our shared correspondent reality promote a supernatural presumption?

[Fallibleone]

My assumption is that your position is "that moral values are not objective and real like gravity, but subjective and imaginary like 'jello tastes better than ice cream'".

And that assumption, as I have already pointed out, is wrong. 'Moral values are subjective and imaginary like jelly tastes better than ice cream' is not an accurate summation of my position. For a start, a preference for jelly over ice cream is not imaginary. The preference is real. Secondly, your summation is too simplistic. Moral values are not a simple matter of liking something alone. Tacking additional words on turns the argument into one that I did not present, but one that you find easier to knock down. That is a straw man argument.
Moral values are real, we all have them. The problem is that it is possible to have different ones from those of other communities or people. This means that they are subjective. One society finds it morally fine to stone adulteresses to death, while another 'knows' it is wrong. Who is right? You because you say so? Sorry, your opinion is worth no more than anyone else's.

So, that would lead me to believe that to you, 'torturing children is wrong' or 'murder is wrong' are not real but just imaginary human constructs.

Again, you are wrong. My feeling that torturing children is wrong is very real. I do not imagine the feeling. That doesn't mean it's an objective moral.

As for finding a quote where you explicitly say "murder is not real", as far as I know none exists.

Thank you for admitting it.

Aside from that, if we follow your reasoning, and kill someone and nothing 'happens', by which, as far as I can gather, you either mean a realisation that murder is 'wrong' or punishment, any sociopath can be said not to have murdered, and anyone who is not caught and put in prison can be said not to have murdered.

I covered that point, the more often you break the law the blinder you get to it, a mafia boss has no problem killing people, after a few dozen hits it becomes old hat. But for you it would be an eye opener.

Your answer again seems to be to an entirely different point from the one it appears after. You said that

If you doubt gravity, test it, drop a ball if it does not fall to the ground, there is no gravity. If you doubt murder is real, test it, kill someone if nothing happens then murder is not real, but just a human construct.

I say to you that by this reasoning, a sociopath can be said not to have murdered, and anyone who is not caught cannot be said to have murdered. I said NOTHING about whether these people are used to killing or not.

My point still stands. Please address it.

If your point was "any sociopath can be said not to have murdered, and anyone who is not caught and put in prison can be said not to have murdered".
My position is that moral values are objective. And any person who has a functioning moral compass can perceive the truth of moral values. Unfortunately in humans the compass has gone wrong so we can't always clearly know what is right and wrong, but we can still work it out.

And my point which you have not addressed again is that you said that 'if nothing happens' (which I take to mean that either you don't feel bad about it or you don't get caught), then 'murder is not real'. If I murdered someone but was not caught or don't feel bad, murder is not real. In which case none of those prostitutes who died in 1888 in Whitechapel was murdered, since no one was ever caught. Murder is not real. I am pointing to the flaw in your argument. Clearly it is not the fact of what 'happens' to the perpetrator afterwards which indicates whether murder is real or not. Moreover, the reality of murder was never in question.

You talk about any person who has a functioning moral compass, and then in the same paragraph, you say that in humans, it has 'gone wrong'. How, then, are you ever to know, if you have a moral compass that has 'gone wrong', that you have worked out right and wrong?

A sociopath is a person whose moral compass has gone very wrong so it is very hard for them to know right from wrong, but it does not excuse them from the hideous things that they do. You, on the other hand, have a very good moral compass so when you do something wrong you know it and feel bad about it and you strive not to do it again.

You need to be clearer about what you consider 'wrong'. Lets take an extreme. If I murdered someone, my reaction to it would probably vary greatly depending on the circumstances. If I got steaming drunk one night and got it into my head that I was going to break into an old lady's house and kill her in her bed, I might be so overcome with guilt for what I had done after I sobered up that I might contemplate suicide. If, on the other hand, I exacted revenge on someone who had murdered my child, I don't think that I would necessarily feel bad, and yet murder apparently is 'wrong'. As I sit here now I feel that murder is wrong, but in the midst of such a situation, that could change. I think that if asked, I might even reply that yes, I would do it again. So things are not as black and white as you seem to suggest. This is a very good example of how objective morals don't exist. What you consider wrong, I might not. Or what I consider wrong at one point in time, I might not in the future.

So you doing bad things is the proof that you need to show that moral values are objective and not just based on personal preference.

But that can't be right. Lots of people consider that taking drugs is 'wrong', and yet I did a fair amount of recreational soft drug-taking when I was at university without ever thinking now or then that it was 'wrong'. I knew that if I was caught with a wrap of the stuff on me that I'd get into trouble with the law, but I always was of the opinion that that would be quite unfair, since I was doing no harm to anyone else. So you assume that I (you think I have a good moral compass) will know automatically what is right and wrong, based on some pre-conceived idea of what my reaction will be if I do something 'wrong'. What you have there is a subjective opinion of what is 'wrong', and a subjective opinion based on very little about what my subjective reaction will be. I must admit that I never expected a proponent of objective morals to try and prove them via the medium of subjective opinions.

And even greater proof is when someone does something bad to you, you will know that they did something objectively wrong to you.

This can't be right either. You said before that our moral compass had 'gone wrong', and yet apparently we are supposed to 'know' (not work out, I might add, as you stated just now) when someone does something objectively wrong to us. Have you heard of BDSM? If not, I'd advise you not to google it at work. Now some people would find it pretty 'wrong' for someone to do some of those things to them, but clearly many people do not. But I think I can take a stab at what your argument will be - 'all these people's moral compasses have gone wrong'. Says who? You? And by what authority?

Please for one moment attempt to answer my posts without just framing another question designed to shift the burden... Instead of questioning my opinion, you would be better served providing evidence of your assertion that all women who abuse their children don't know what they're doing.

In my experience I have found that people do not do what they think is wrong unless they have a good reason to do so.

Then your experience is limited. Have you never heard someone say 'I knew it was wrong but I did it anyway'? What would a 'good reason' be?

The mother may think that she is instilling discipline in the child and it is good for the child, but she is mistaken and really does not know what she is doing.

It does not follow that because she has a mistaken view that the abuse will benefit the child, she does not know what she is doing.

A healthy woman will not abuse a child, therefore women who do abuse children must be ill mentally, morally or spiritually.

Says who? The only one of those three possibilities which is known to exist is mental illness. The others are made up. It is true that some mothers who harm their children are mentally ill, but this cannot be applied to all mothers. I happen to have an opinion that quite a few paedophiles might do what they do because they are mentally ill, but I recognise that this is not a popular viewpoint, because it takes the responsibility for their actions away from the paedophile, and since I am not an expert on paedophilia I accept that I might be being too soft on them. I could be wrong, but I sense an unwillingness to make women accountable for their actions in what you say.

What about fathers who abuse their children?

I still see no evidence for your argument, only more opinions. Although you seem to think it does, your opinion does not count as evidence.

More straw men. Nowhere have I said that I do not think that abusing children is wrong. I feel it is wrong, and I probably always will. What I am asking you to do is show that it is objectively wrong. Your attack on an argument that was never there does not do this.

All I can say is trust your moral compass

I'm afraid that fails as evidence. You already said that our moral compass is broken, and I took drugs without feeling it was wrong. Anything else?

... if you go out and murder someone, your moral eyes will be opened and you will gain the knowledge of good and evil.

You have not performed the experiment. It is only another unsupported assertion that 'it is all the same'. According to you, one must perform the experiment in order to see right and wrong. Is there any reason which makes this not apply to you too?

Where did I say "one must perform the experiment in order to see right and wrong"?

What you did say was:

If you honestly believe in moral relativism, just try torturing children or carry a gun into a convenience store and ask for all their money, you will know after the fact that it is objectively wrong, even if you don't get caught and punished for it. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

If you doubt murder is real, test it, kill someone if nothing happens then murder is not real, but just a human construct.

My assertion is that if you go out and murder someone, your moral eyes will be opened and you will gain the knowledge of good and evil.

What you seem to be doing is taking your own personal (subjective) experience of what happened to you when you did something 'wrong' and assuming that it will be the same for all. You seem to be applying this in areas where you have not in fact done the experiment (murder), simply because in areas where you have done it, you experienced a specific reaction. So basically, subjective experience is to be taken as evidence of objective moral values, and if someone disagrees, it's because they haven't done the experiment. If they have done the experiment and they don't end up feeling the same way you do, their moral compass is just very wrong.

My position is that if a healthy person does something wrong they will know that they have done something wrong.

As I said, you first have to explain what you mean by 'wrong'. Since we are still waiting for an example of an objective moral value, this is tricky. Do you mean if a healthy person does something which you think is wrong they will know that they have done something wrong? What if I (you think I have a good moral compass) do something which I think is wrong, but that you think is perfectly fine, like punching someone in a boxing match, or having my children christened? Will I find out that actually it is right?

It is also true that a healthy person will know that it is wrong to do something morally wrong without doing the experiment, but they can still live under the false assumption that moral values are not objective.

You have yet to show that the view that moral values are not objective is a false assumption. But anyway this makes no sense. What you are saying is that if I do something that is considered morally wrong, I will know that it is in fact wrong - and yet this has not been my experience. But perhaps drugs-taking is not morally wrong. What do 'objective moral values' have to say on the matter?

It is more than just 'you will feel bad about it' it is like a sheet of glass breaking and you can never put it back together again. I am appealing to your human nature to know good from evil, we act as if moral values are objective, and it would be very hard to live our lives as if they were not.

According to you, after having experienced this 'sheet of glass breaking' which you can 'never put back', some people go on to become blind. At what point? After murder number 2? 3? 10? Why would they do that?

Generally people do not start with murder, it may start with shoplifting a candy bar followed by a steady escalation of anti-social behavior which may progress to murders.

You said that doing something wrong is like a sheet of glass breaking, something which can never be put back. Ones moral eyes are opened. How, after that, does one go on to do more and more bad things, even though they realised that it is wrong? Or are you saying that all these people got their moral compass fixed for a short time and then broke it again? People go blind, regain their sight and then go blind again? Why? We've already established that you think no one would do something which they thought was wrong without good reason.

'Evil', as I have already explained, is not a concept which has much meaning to me, because it is fundamentally a religious one, and I am not religious. Outside of religion I think it is meaningless, and therefore I argue that nothing in my human nature will show knowledge of it. I know what people would like done to them generally, and I know what they would not like. This is because I know what I would and would not like, and being a social animal, I want to do stuff that people will like, and avoid stuff that people won't like. I have no desire to be ostracised.

I wish that we were all like you, however we have people like Tomas de Torquemada, Vlad Tepes, Adolph Hitler, Ivan the Terrible, Adolph Eichmann, Pol Pot, Mao Tse-tung, Idi Amin, Joseph Stalin and Genghis Khan. The word 'evil' best describes these and many other people.

Sure, if you're religious. But I've said several times now that I am not. 'Evil' is not the word which best describes them for me. 'Evil' does not have any relevance for me. It suggests a supernatural entity at work, and we know how I feel about them. This is odd in the light of your previous comments about how mothers who abuse their children don't know what they are doing. Why does the word 'evil' not best describe them? And why were Tomas de Torquemada, Vlad Tepes, Adolph Hitler, Ivan the Terrible, Adolph Eichmann, Pol Pot, Mao Tse-tung, Idi Amin, Joseph Stalin and Genghis Khan not just unaware of what they were doing?

[JoeyKnothead]

How does belittling the natural or our shared correspondent reality promote a supernatural presumption?

It seems to me an attempt to divert attention away from the unproven claim that objective moral values exist. Some theists are very adept at veering the conversation off course, in order to create a scenario where the god hypothesis could skirt around issues of proof.